10 September 2014

The Communist Manifesto is
a classic by any standards. It is never out of print and is stocked in ordinary
bookshops all over the world, selling steadily year after year.

The
work was started in mid-1847 in England by Frederick Engels and Karl Marx when
Marx was 29 and Engels was 27. The work was published in January or February of
1848, just in time for the outbreak of revolutions all over Europe.

The
new masters, the formerly slave-owning but now capitalist bourgeoisie, also
known as burghers or burgesses, were a class that had grown up in the towns
under the rule of rural-based feudalism. Marx and Engels were convinced that
the bourgeoisie were themselves sooner or later going to be overthrown by the
working proletariat. This was the class of free citizens (i.e. not slaves)
owning nothing but their Labour-Power, that the bourgeoisie had brought into
existence by employing them. The bourgeoisie were taking over from the feudal
lords by revolution. They would themselves be toppled by revolution –
proletarian revolution – said Marx and Engels.

Commissioned
to write the Manifesto by the Communist League, Marx and Engels struggled to
meet the agreed deadline, but came through with a magnificent text published
just prior to the February, 1848 events in Paris. These events brought the
proletariat as actors on to the stage of history to an extent that had never
been seen before, thoroughly vindicating Engels and Marx.

Short
as it is, the Manifesto is so rich and so compressed as to be saturated with
meaning. It is practically impossible to summarise. Here are some of the most
extraordinary sentences of the first section of the Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and
proletariat.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and
his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

Proletarians and Communists

The
second part of the Communist Manifesto contains statements about the Communist
Party, about the family, about religion, and frank statements about the
bourgeoisie.

The
second part shows, among other things, the centrality of the relations of production
that create and sustain the effect known as capital, which then in turn defines
everything else in bourgeois society.

“Proletarians
and Communists” also looks forward to the way that society can be changed, and
thus serves to remind us that Marx’s work is always intentional, and is never
merely empirical, descriptive or disinterested.

“The average price of wage labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that
quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the
labourer in bare existence as a labourer,” wrote Marx and Engels.

“But does wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit.
It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labour, and
which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage
labour for fresh exploitation.”

They
finish the section with this unforgettable, classic vision:

“…a vast association of the whole nation…
in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all.”